To protect users privacy and to prevent from advertisers tracking Mozilla introduced Do Not Track for their Firefox browser, now advertisers start to respect DNT and the browsers like Opera (Opera 12 already has) and Chrome (adding this feature in future versions) too have this feature in near future. Hang on! Mozilla seems doesn’t stopping here they’re wanting “ Do Not Track for email too”, as an initial step they’ve prepared a patch that will add DNT support to upcoming Thunderbird 15 version. In fact if you’re using daily builds of thunderbird you’ve this feature in Security Options(check the screenshot below), if you’ve enabled DNT for thunderbird and if you open an email message sent by any marketing or advertising firm you won’t be tracked from now on.

Mozilla wants to add Do Not Track for Email Too

Email Tracking, how it works: You can be tracked not only through browsers and pages but through email as well. At times email messages that contain external images needed to be loaded from web to display on the screen, where these images to be fetched by mail clients using the same technologies used by the browser, when the email is shown on your screen, a web server can learn that you opened the message. That’s what email tracking is.

“By attaching a unique ID to the URL for the image, the server can also know which specific message caused the request — including to which email address the message was sent. Email marketing organizations often use this information to track which messages you read, which links in messages you click, and then provide more customized messages in the future.” Sid Stamm privacy engineer at Mozilla says in his blog.

Mozilla soon will work with email marketing firms and asks them to respect DNT request.